As related
to James M. Hylton on
April 9, 1941. At that time
Mr. Nash was 76
years old, lived on Wise Mountain,
Wise Co.,
VA. This story is part of the
WPA Project,
located at the Alderman Library, The
University of Virginia, Charlottesville,
VA.

The
Old Woman and The Cinders

All
this I am telling you about Swifts
Silver was before the War but my mother
knew my father s business and Uncle
Jessie s business better than I did I guess
and when
they would sit and tell the tales
of Swift and
the Silver he was supposed to have
hidden it
was something to interest anyone and
I listened
to all that I heard them say. Everyone
knows I
am interested in this and have been
for some
years and I have traced down every
bit of
evidence I have heard of about Swift
being in
this part of the country. I went to
see a woman
down at Coeburn or rather between
Flatwoods
and Coeburn and she told me this tale
of his
mother who said she found some silver
that
had been melted and the slag an dirt
had held
to one end of the cinder-like formation
and she
thought that it was some kind of old
iron that
had been left there in the hills but
as she was
picking Blackberries at the time she
never said
anything about it to anyone for years
later.
Then when she did think of it she
told her
family about it and they having heard
of
Swift s Silver went in search for
it. The old
lady had grown feeble by this time
and almost
blind herself and some of her sons
carried her
all the way into the mountains and
she tried to
point out to them where she had thrown
the
stuff she had found the few years
before. It
was a place where nobody would have
been
apt to find it but they hunted high
and low but
could not find the big piece she said
she had
found and thrown there. However they
did find
some silver ore with some slag and
rust-like
dirt or sand hung onto it. It was
a good deal
smaller than she said she had found
and they
thought that someone had more than
likely
found it and had broken it on a rock
to see
what it was and when it broke and
they saw the
Silver part of it they took it along
with them
after being unable to find the other
piece they
had broken off on the rock. They carried
the
old lady back and she tried to draw
a map and
show them where she found the metal
but all
searches would up a failure and it
was not so
long after that she died. However
her relatives
have hunted time and again for trace
of it and
every time any of them go into that
section of
the hills they make brief search hoping
they
will at least find where she found
it.

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